Marking the end of Chinese New Year

Taken at the flower market in Hong Kong last year

Western new year is over in a flash (or in some cases, prolonged only by an enduring post-party hangover), but Chinese New Year is celebrated over two weeks. I hadn’t really observed tradition this year (no relatives in London means there’s no bai neen for me – visiting houses to wish relatives good fortune and such) apart from making radish cake and giving my parents the requisite phone call on New Year’s day… ;-)

The last day of the Chinese New Year (the 15th day) is called yuen siu, also known as the lantern festival. In Hong Kong, Victoria Park would have no doubt been alight with massive lit floats and structures (though, I don’t think they did it last year…hmm!) and with children running rampant with (health and safety approved) plastic lanterns depicting the cartoon character du jour, though more traditionally one would carry paper lanterns lit with a single candle; another popular lantern is the ubiquitous bunny-shaped one, which is my personal favourite (though, I remember my childhood days when it was the epitome of cool to have a plastic Sailor Moon lantern.)

Families will also indulge in the making of and eating of tong yuen (湯圓), sweet glutinous dumplings. More of the latter, as modern times means most people would rather buy ready-made varieties from the supermarket chiller… but as someone who had never made tong yuen before, I can vouch for how easy it is to prepare in your own home! My black sesame filling is a tad rudimentary and not molten and silky like I prefer, but it definitely sated the craving for tong yuen on a chilly London night!

Black sesame tong yuen
Based on a recipe from Flavour and Fortune
For the black sesame filling
1 1/2 cups black sesame seeds
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
1/2 cup solid shortening (I substituted some unsalted butter, which probably contributes to a much richer taste).
For the dumplings
2 cups glutinous rice flour
3/4 cup hot water (approximately)

1. For the filling: place the sesame seeds into a dry pan and toast over a medium low heat until fragrant. Tip into a mini food processor and pulse until powder-like.

2. Mix in the icing sugar and knead in the shortening/butter until you get a well-mixed paste. (In reality I didn’t read the instructions thoroughly and bunged everything into the food processor. It worked okay but kneading by hand will probably make a smoother paste. My food processor isn’t very good either at ‘powderising’ the black sesame seeds, so my mixture was rather coarse.) Refrigerate until firm (again I didn’t do this as I didn’t have time – but this will make filling your tong yuen much easier as you can shape the filling into small balls and work the tong yuen dough around it).

4. For the dumplings: Sift the glutinous rice flour into a bowl and slowly add the water, stirring with long chopsticks until the mixture comes together to form a dough. Knead with your hands until smooth and elastic (you may not need all of the water – and this recipe is so simple, you can just add more rice flour or water as you need to get the right consistency).

5. Break off a small piece about the size of a 50p coin (smaller or bigger depending on how large you like your tong yuen to be – it’s easier to fill a bigger one though!). Roll between your palms to create a ball.

6. Now make an indentation in the middle of the ball and work, using your fingers, to make the hole deeper – forming a ‘cup’ if you will – large enough for a nice wodge of filling. If you’ve refrigerated your filling you can roll little bits into small balls and fit it inside the hole before drawing the edges together and rolling again into a smooth ball. With my slightly liquidy filling this proved more difficult, so I didn’t put as much into each ball as I would have liked! (And sometimes the filling leaked out… as you can see from some of the tong yuens in the background in the picture below!) I find it easier to pinch the open ends together and then draw the two corners together again before rolling. Roll between your palms until completely smooth.

7. Put a pan of water onto a rolling boil (gee, lots of rolling in this recipe…) and carefully drop the tong yuens in. They’re ready when they float to the surface. Remove with a slotted spoon and place into a serving bowl.

8. In a separate pan, bring more water to the boil and drop in one piece of rock sugar or peen tong (a brown slab of sugar, readily available in Chinese supermarkets) and a knob of ginger. Bring to the boil and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Taste. It should be lightly sweet and gingery but not syrupy. Ladle over the tong yuen and serve.

smooth (tofu) operator

Ah, tofu. So versatile. Humble tofu, you take on the flavours of your neighbours with much gusto and much skill, making you the perfect ingredient for a damn good dish. You’re perfect stuffed with fish paste and fried, steamed with prawns and a smattering of fried garlic and spring onions, and miso soup would be lonely without your presence. Pockmarked Aunty Ma would have been a nobody without you. And yet you excel not only in your savoury incarnations, but in sweet delights.

Behold: the Tofu Fa (豆腐花). Silken tofu in a clear sweet soup.

A bit of exploring around the streets of Sham Shui Po today led us to this famed little shop specialising in tofu. Kung Wo Soybean Factory is one of the oldest companies in Hong Kong, having been established over a 100 years ago – in 1893, on Canton Road in Mong Kok. They’ve gotta be doing something right. And I shall testify for that – the 豆腐花 I had was seriously the best I’ve ever had – impossibly silky, melt in your mouth goodness. Smooth and fresh, with no hint of the bitterness that some tofu desserts still retain despite the copious amounts of sugar some vendors add to the soup. The clear soup was not too sweet, but sweet enough so that I, a promising future diabetic, didn’t need to help myself to spoonfuls of the yellow sugar laid out on the table in tubs. Perfectly warmed, though a cold version would have been excellent on a hot summer’s day. And at only $6HKD a pop, who can complain? Such a small price to pay for such deliciousness. Are you getting the hint yet, London?

Charming little place, but again – eat and go – grab a bag of the fried tofu ‘lumps’, or several blocks of fresh, silky tofu for dinner. The possibilities are endless. Apparently they do a mean soy bean milk as well, and their freshly pan-fried tofu with fish paste (diligently made to order) is to die for. There is a limit to how much tofu one can have in a day, though…

公和荳品廠 | Kung Wo Soybean Factory
118 Pei Ho St, Sham Shui Po
Tel: 2386 6871
Open daily 7am-9pm
MTR station: Sham Shui Po (Pei Ho St exit)

my perfect valentine

Forget the chocolates. Save the roses. And please, don’t ever try to give me yet another fuzzy wuzzy teddy or stuffed puppy holding a bright red heart declaring your undying love. I used to be quite into V-day, but rapidly over the years the cynic in me has grown to shun the whole idea (I still make cards though, and buy little gifts for the boyf, except they’re more tongue-in-cheek than mushy and cheesier than brie). I think though, if I had to choose to be inundated with the fluffy, pastel-toned throes of Valentine excess, I’d choose these heart shaped macarons from my now-favourite place, Antique Patisserie.

I’d only seen heart-shaped macs over at La Durée, but to me, LD’s version is rather ugly after you get over the initial delight at seeing an unconventionally shaped macaron. I really don’t like the piping they did to make the heart – it would have been so much nicer as a smooth heart-shaped dome. Which was what Antique did! Sure, some of the hearts were a little bit wonky, but generally it failed not in making me squeal with glee. Seeing as Yuki is halfway away across the world, I got one delectable rose flavoured, heart-shaped macaron for myself (and threw in an Earl Grey one for good measure – theirs are perfect!). My family also enjoyed a very rich, gooey, chocolate mousse cake (the ‘moussy sacher’, an interpretation of a decadant Viennese chocolate cake, sacher torte) covered with the most beautiful and perfect dark chocolate glaze ever. A good Valentine’s day, spent with two of the people I love most :)

Antique Patisserie
Shop 309-310, The Lee Gardens, 33 Hysan Avenue, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
Tel: 2907 2908

my pancake days, and blueberry nights

This date has been marked in my diary for ages. Quite funnily, I mentioned to my parents tonight that it was pancake day the next morning, and they were rather baffled by the entire concept. I guess it’s true, no one really celebrates Shrove Tuesday in Hong Kong – I for one never heard of the whole concept until I moved to London, when my uni flatmates enlightened me and we celebrated with a feast of pancakes (which effectively replaced our dinner).

This year I won’t be making pancakes, simply because I again don’t have the ingredients, as simple as they are, and don’t feel like buying them for a one-off breakfast. Also, I have far more tasty things to eat – like my mom’s Chinese New Year turnip cake, which we made together today (more on that later!). But I love pancake day and thought I’d dedicate a post to it anyway, digging up lots of pancake photos from my flickr history. Also it’s a good time to mention Nigella’s wonderful time-saving pancake mix, as well as her blueberry syrup recipe which is absolutely gorgeous. And if you’re unlucky to get a batch of underripe, sour blueberries, this is the perfect way to make use of them (ah, for they have not died in vain!).

Nigella’s pancake mix
600g/1lb 5oz plain flour
3 tbsp baking powder
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp salt
40g/2½oz caster sugar

& for every 150g/5¼oz dry mixture you’ll need
1 medium free-range egg, lightly beaten
250ml/9fl oz milk
1 tbsp melted butter

Making pancakes is so logical, so I’ll save the patronising ‘this is how you make pancakes!’ drole. BLUEBERRY SYRUP TIME! I tried this for the first time two months ago and it came out really well, and it’s pretty much foolproof. I like it much better than mixing blueberries into the pancake batter (which don’t turn out well, as you can see in the photo above… scary!) to get awesome blueberry pancakes. And, as Nigella says, maple syrup and blueberries are both so good for you – so it’s a guiltfree sugar high!

All you need really is 150ml maple syrup and 200g blueberries (fresh or frozen are both fine), bung it all into a small saucepan and bring it to the boil and then let it simmer, crushing the berries as you go. Reduce until it’s a great big gloopy, dark purple syrup. You can serve it right away with your pancakes, but I personally thought it tasted better after a stint in the fridge, and it goes a bit jammy – cold, blueberry syrup on hot buttered pancakes. What better thing to have for breakfast? (Except for maguro-don, but that’s a whole different can of sardines…)

As for the blueberry ‘nights’, I attempted to make a spinoff of that glorious Scottish dessert, cranachan, by using blueberries instead of raspberries. I had it for the first time last September when we visited a wonderful Scottish family, and couldn’t forget that wonderful taste – the crunchy toasted pinhead oats (which I cannot for the life of me find in London – can anyone help?), the soft, vanilla-y whiskey infused cream, and the juicy, sweet raspberries. Guuhhh. Taste sensation or what. I’m sad to say my blueberry concoction was a far cry from Liz’s cranachan, obviously not helped by the lack of whiskey in our cabinet, but I’ll try again. I did, however, try to replicate the slightly heady aroma of alcohol by macerating the berries in very strong earl grey tea (I know, when will I stop the tea obsession?) – I have to say, it worked quite well!

tea trio chiffon cakes

I love baking, but I’m not very good at it. Most of the time the end products will taste better than they look, so please believe me when I say these chiffon cakes were wonderful!

I’ve been on a bit of a tea kick lately, as evidenced by the last few posts, so I decided to incorporate various flavours into a pillow-soft cake. A chiffon cake recipe seemed perfect for the job, and after scouring the net for some recipes, I came across Tham Jiak’s recipe for green tea chiffon cake. I simply replaced the green tea with earl grey tea and loose earl grey tea leaves to sprinkle into the mixture, and for subsequent batches, experimented with osmanthus green tea and ceylon tea with dried rosebuds!

The earl grey chiffon was simply made with brewed tea and loose tea leaves sprinkled into the mixture, and the other two followed a pretty similar method. I had some osmanthus green tea bags (TenRen, excellent Taiwanese tea company), as well as some loose dried osmanthus flowers. For the last one, I used loose ceylon tea leaves and crushed the pink leaves from some dried rosebud tea. The osmanthus and rose petals made for some pretty decorations on top of the cakes! But the ceylon tea and rose version was the least successful, because (1) I must have somehow measured out the tea wrong, so the end batter was too liquid, resulting in a too-moist cake, and (2) I couldn’t think of any way to invert my tins to allow the cake to cool without squashing the tops flat, so I left it as is – and as expected, they collapsed and have a dip in the middle!

Out of the three cakes I made, my favourite is still the earl grey version. The other two were too subtle, so I may have to make adjustments to the quantities of tea I use next time. I was afraid of going overboard with the osmanthus, but turns out that I could have been a lot more heavy-handed with the delicate golden flowers. Nevertheless, the aroma came through, if not a bit too lightly. The ceylon tea with rosebuds was very nice but I didn’t add enough of the ceylon, because I didn’t want it to overpower the rose! It was really fragrant and not too floral (which I hate – why would you want to eat a soap-flavoured cake?), and again, I think it was only let down by its over-moist texture.

I really like chiffon cake because it’s so light and airy (there’s no butter involved), and you definitely don’t feel bloated after eating an entire one (err… which may be what I did after they came out of the oven…). It’s also a really great base for incorporating any flavour you want. Now that I’ve made these chiffon cakes, my next mission will be to create tea macarons. Mmm, osmanthus-scented macarons? I can imagine that would be divine. But that shall have to wait, for I’d need a million more implements and I really shouldn’t be cluttering up my parents’ tiny kitchen with more frivolous bakers’ “essentials”!

The recipe for earl grey chiffon lies under the entry cut.